YouTube. Hours and hours of YouTube. That’s all I ever watch except when I watch porn.

My 17 year old truck has all the features I need from a vehicle. If I can just keep it running I have no desire to upgrade it in the foreseeable future. Even if I had infinite money I’d probably just get one with lower mileage and upgrade it with offroad accessories and stuff. I have basically zero interest in new cars.

There may be others reasons to interview Bill Gates about AI than the fact that he’s rich and famous.

If this isn’t the most cynical message forum then I don’t know what is.

The same cheap dark roast from LIDL that I always drink

I prefer 1080p but if not available then 720p is perfectly fine as well. 4k is overkill and I don’t even have a monitor that could play it at native resolution. Where I do prefer “lower quality” though is framerate. I don’t like how 60fps looks so I force YouTube to play videos at 24fps.

Letting someone borrow my phone is rather foreign concept to me. That’s like borrowing my toothbrush. Use your own.

So I assume that since it was withdrawn, this doesn’t set a precedent and it’s only a matter of time untill they try to sneak it thru with a different name.

A part on my mountain bike (freehub) broke and I was going to replace it but I couldn’t get the old one out without damaging the wheel so instead I moved all the new parts from the replacement into the body of the old one which itself was in good-enough condition. Now it works again and I didn’t need to spend and extra money.

I must be watching different videos than the people complaining about YouTube comments. The ones I see are virtually all positive.

I agree but there’s also an add-on for that

I went from doing plumbing for 10 years to running my own business where I do all kinds of renovation projects so there’s been plenty of things I’ve done for the first time recently and today I’m giving an estimate on yet another such job.

New things I’ve done during the past few months: installing kitchen cabinets and doors, applying wallpaper, fixing holes on a steel roof and cleaning a tile roof from moss and treating with solution intented to prevent new growth.

Right there with you. I understood none of it so here’s chatGPT’s intrepretation of it:

They reminisce about how, historically, business people paid workers based on perceived merit, leading to feelings of underwhelm among workers. This dissatisfaction opened the door for organized criminals who promised better compensation, thus fostering a shadow economy. This historical anecdote sets up a discussion about the introduction of the minimum wage as a regulatory response to such economic exploitation.

The author then draws a parallel between this economic dynamic and social dynamics. Just as bad actors exploited workers’ dissatisfaction, they argue that social isolation makes individuals vulnerable to negative influences. When people feel isolated and lack social support, they might be more likely to fall into bad company, similar to how workers turned to criminals for better pay.

The crux of the argument is that just as there is a “minimum wage” to ensure fair economic treatment, there might be a need for a “minimum reference point” in social contexts to prevent isolation and the subsequent vulnerability to bad actors. The author is pondering why society doesn’t apply the same proactive thinking to prevent social isolation as it does to prevent economic exploitation.

The concluding thoughts suggest that the author has observed people being drawn into negative social circles due to a lack of alternatives, similar to how workers once turned to criminals. They are calling for a societal reflection on how to provide better social support and prevent people from being lured into detrimental situations due to loneliness or isolation.

Assuming this is correct I kind of understand what OP is saying but I still don’t get what they’re actually suggesting. Some form of mandatory socialization for isolated people perhaps?

Where does the profit come from if someone who doesn’t deal with ads is forced to watch an ad?

The creator gets paid for people watching the ads, not for buying the product. For the most part the point of ads is to increase brand recognition which in turn increases sales. Ads work wether you think they do or not. It’s among the most studied economic fields. There’s a good reason companies spend a ton of money on advertising. More people seeing ads = more sales. I too like to tell myself a story about how I’m immune to ads but I know I’m not.

Data-invasive, targeted advertising is superfluous and needs to die.

I agree. The alternative is paying for the service eg. subscribtion based business model.

Targeted or not - I’m not going to watch ads. If it’s a bad service like Instagram I’m just going to stop using it but in the case of YouTube if they manage to make adblocking sufficiently difficult and inconvenient then I’m going to buy premium. I can’t blame them for wanting to get rid of freeriders. If I was them I would probably want to too. Blocking ads is like piracy; I participate in it but it cannot be morally justified. I’m effectively stealing.

I’m not informed enough to know how peertube works but running it is not free either. Nor is running a lemmy instance. Lemm.ee for example has a limit even on the size of images you can upload despite the fact that hosting images is orders of magnitude less bandwith and storage requiring than videos.

Ad-revenue is literally how content creators get paid. If you’re using an adblocker (like me) then you’re freeriding. They’re not getting any money from us viewing their videos.

Nobody is forcing anyone to watch ads. That’s the alternative available to people who don’t want to pay. The other alternative is premium membership. Which ever you choose makes money for the creators. Blocking ads doesn’t.

I hate ads just as much as the next guy but this mentality of expecting to get content for free is ridiculous. That’s unbelieveably narrow sighted and self-centered thinking. If subscribtion based business model was the norm instead of ads-based then we’d have none of the issues that come with targeted advertising. On the other hand if one thinks google is evil company and don’t want to give them money then stop using their products. Damn hypocrites…

Content creators get nothing from a subscription To YouTube premium.

This is not true. If you’re a free user they’re getting a share of the ad-revenue. If you’re a premium user they’re getting share of the membership fee. The more videos you watch from a creator the more they earn.

Source

Also. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to run a video hosting platform? Especially at the scale of YouTube. There’s a good reason Lemmy doesn’t have videos.

You’re not paying to not see ads. You’re paying for the content on the platform. You can pay either by watching ads or by paying for premium.

The fact that you use their services despite claiming to oppose them probably tells more about how you really feel than your words do. You’re benefiting from their abusive business model the same whey they themselves are. Justifying the continued use of their services by not paying is just a cope to deal with the cognitive dissonance.

I’ll buy premium when they finally manage to either prevent adblocking entirely or make it sufficiently inconvenient. Stopping using YouTube is not an option for me and neither is watching ads. YouTube (along with porn) is the internet for me. If I’m not viewing either content, I’m probably not on my computer.

Hell, I don’t even blame them. I can’t morally justify blocking ads and viewing their content for free. I do it because it’s easy and I get away with it. I don’t believe in ads-based business model and that basically leaves subscribtion as the only viable alternative. Not paying and still using the service isn’t exactly practicing what I preach.